Carbon and canaries
November 21st, 2007A lifelong friend of my wife’s dropped in for a chat last week (let’s call her Mary). Mary chatted away happily about a recent long haul flight with her husband to do the safari bit in Africa. They had managed to fit this in between their regular EasyJet trips to their holiday home in Italy.
Mary lives on other side of Scotland, but pops over to Edinburgh every month to get her hair done. She drives a Mercedes the size of a small truck.
Surely it’s impossible for anyone who watches television to be ignorant of the scientific evidence: high carbon lifestyles are accelerating climate change; climate change is wreaking increasing damage on vulnerable communities.
Nowhere is this more visible than Bangladesh - also in the news. With melting Himalayan snowfields to the north and rising sea levels to the south, this beautiful fertile country sustains a densely packed population on land barely above sea level. As climate change kicks in, Bangladesh will be in the front line, as this year’s floods and cyclone demonstrates.
So when Mary struggles to reverse her vast car into the drive, it’s very tempting to greet her with: “Hello Mary. How many Bangladeshis have you drowned since we last met?” Today, this would be considered highly offensive - too judgmental of someone’s lifestyle.
However social attitudes can be changed. A few decades ago you would have been thought eccentric if you banned visitors from smoking in your house. Now smokers are exiled automatically into rainy streets. We are making real progress in kicking the nicotine habit – we now need to kick the far more pervasive and addictive carbon habit.
Too difficult? Miners used to take canaries down coal mines to act as a warning - the canaries’ lives were cheap and expendable. It is not acceptable to treat the people of Bangladesh as the canaries for climate change.
November 24th, 2007 at 3:48 am
First of all, climate change cannot be helped. The climate is always changing. The Earth is constantly vacillating between warming periods and ice ages, it’s a fact of life. The cycle is not and cannot be influenced by how much carbon our vehicles produce. And if you want to cut down on carbon emissions, industries of China, India and other emerging markets are far worse polluters than your neighbor’s SUV.
Second, the melting of the ice caps in the arctic will actually result in a *lowering* of the sea level. Water expands when it freezes and takes up far more volume as ice than it does as liquid. It’s elementary physics. Do a simple experiment, put as much ice as you can in a glass, then fill the glass to the rim with water, then wait about an hour for the ice to melt. After the ice has melted you will see that the water level is indeed lower after the ice has melted.
Third, the flooding that you seem to think is caused by your neighbor’s car is in fact influenced more by the fact that the core of the Earth is changing its orientation. Ev
November 24th, 2007 at 4:07 am
Let me start that sentence again…
Every 12,000 years or so the core of the Earth will flip flop and the the magnetic North side will flip and become the magnetic South side. It’s hard to believe, but it is happening right now. The electromagnetic energy generated from the change affects the weather, affects the tides, affects the wobble of the Earth. It affects everything on the planet. It is this pole shift that is causing the strange weather and flooding in places like Bangladesh, not SUVs.
Fourth, the Earth is heating up, not because of this terrible monster called Carbon Dioxide. It is heating up because the Sun itself is heating up right now. Add the increased energy from the sun combined with the effects on the ionosphere (the Earth’s natural electromagnetic shield from the sun’s radiation) that the pole shift is causing is resulting in an increased temperature on the Earth.
And last but not least, if you are worried about too much Carbon Dioxide in the air then do something drastic, install a Carbon reclamation machine, I mean plant a tree. Trees and plants use Carbon Dioxide to convert the suns energy into sustenance through photosynthesis. Complaining about your neighbor’s SUV will never make the impact that planting a tree will.
Your rant holds no water. There is no evidence to back up your hypothesis that SUVs are causing floods in Bangladesh. That is like saying flushing my toilet here in Texas somehow deprives an Afrikaner from finding a toothbrush. The two things are completely unrelated.
If you really want to find out about something made of human hands that affects the climate of the world, do yourself a favor and google for the HAARP array. It is a massive array of antennae that the US gov uses to super-heat the atmosphere for conducting various experiments with energy transmission. Now that would be a topic for a blog post.
Cheers.
November 26th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Thanks for your comments, which are interesting, but unfortunately not supported by the scientific community:
“Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years … Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations … Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns … ”
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf
I could go on, but the scientific evidence is now so well established and so easily available that there isn’t much point. After all, I guess there are still some folks who believe the earth is flat - if so, their delusion doesn’t affect anyone else. I wish the same was true of those embracing carbon-intensive lifestyles.